“When we lay the soil of our hard lives open to the rain of grace and let joy penetrate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows."
~ Ann Voskamp

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Daddy Thoughts

Thanks to you, I know more about Abbot and Costello and the Marx Brothers than anyone else my age whom I've ever met.

When my husband starts singing a random line of a song he heard years ago and never forgot, I laugh. I think of you. And I tell him, "You're just like my dad!"

I miss hearing you play the Beatles and Polka Varieties and "Oh How He Loves You And Me" on the piano in the evenings. Last night the Pilot was playing his guitar, and I asked him if he knew "Blackbird" and he didn't, never even heard it before, and not only was I flabbergasted that I knew a song he didn't, I thought way back years and years to you playing Blackbird on your guitar. You made music part of the language that your children still speak.

After that first breakup I will never forget how you hugged me and prayed for me and for my heart and for my future husband.

One of the reasons I realized I wanted to marry the Pilot was because he is passionate about what he does, and I grew up with a father who chose to do something he believed in and was passionate about even if it meant sometimes things were tight.

One of my favorite pictures from the wedding is you walking me down the aisle and us grinning at each other.

I was looking at Father's Day cards and I picked up one that said something about the countless hours and thousands of dollars a child costs and all the father gets is a Father's Day card, and I thought wryly that whoever wrote the card had missed the whole point. Because a father is someone who never looks at his kids and sees time and money spent. He looks at them and sees his kids whom he loves in a way that cannot be measured. In a time when good fathers seem to be an endangered species, I hear the stories and read the articles and the statistics and I thank God that I have you as my daddy.

So here's to many more years of Beatles tunes and musicals and you beating all of us kids at Finish Lines because you never forget a movie title or a song lyric. Here's to hundreds more grins and giggles and jokes. Thank you for the love you have always shown me and for the dad you've always been to me.